Jason and Haruka grew the big, fat Virginia peanuts over the summer. Shelled by Bob, Amy and Garth, they are full of sunshine and energy, protein and fat and have flavor to die for. The peanut brittle came out perfect – golden, airy and scrumptious. Haruka’s face glows with a smile that warms the air between us. My day is already complete and it’s only 10am.

Heading back to the house, I pass through the green house. The air in here is tropical – warm, moist and alive. I close my eyes and inhale deeply, savoring the vibrant aroma of plants, sweat and soil. I’m transported. The world glows golden on the other side of my eyelids. This is bliss.

Hours later I return to the greenhouse to find everyone hard at work. Brussel sprouts, Swiss chard and Butterhead lettuce are fluorescent in the late afternoon sun. The speakers pour music into the humid air. Haruka is planting seeds into trays.

Jason, Amy and Garth are building a bed. With broad forks and rakes, they break up the soil, rake it smooth and cover it with mulch. No petroleum based fertilizers are being used here. No pesticides. Again, the rich smell lifts me from my world of to do lists and deadlines into the real world. And when I step outside again, I recognize life all around me in what had seemed to be a frozen, dead landscape.

We share the bounty produced by Jason and Haruka’s hard work through our CSA boxes. In addition to greens, peanuts and dozens of other vegetables, they also grow rice and beans, which really excites me. Complete protein, right next door! In terms of self reliance, beans and rice is a huge accomplishment.

Garth has been accepted as an apprentice and Amy plans on volunteering in exchange for learning the secrets of growing organic food. Their labor will feed us in the months to come.

If the world economy were balanced, farmers would earn more money than bankers, politicians, investors and accountants. Instead, the folks who grow our food next door are working for peanuts.

With all the CSA action going on around us, we hardly have to grow anything in our own garden.  But Bob could no more stop growing food than a fish could stop breathing water, so this year he decided to plant more of the things we end up buying at the grocery store.

That would be potatoes, onions and garlic.  Now, of course we get some white potatoes in our CSA boxes and in the fall we get enough sweet potatoes to see us through the winter, but we like the whites so much, we end up buying them even in the summer.

Bob and I come by our love of spuds honestly, being as how we both have Irish ancestors.  We love them baked, boiled, roasted, in soups and salads, deep fried, scalloped and mashed with gravy.  We especially like the creamy taste of fingerling potatoes, so Bob planted several varieties of those.

The first potatoes to mature were the Red Thumbs.  Planted in March, these ninety day potatoes were ready to harvest this week.  Bob dug up the bed, set up wash buckets and brought in seventeen pounds of beautiful potatoes all cleaned and ready to throw in a pot or pan.  What an amazing return on the initial investment of the pound of seed potatoes he used to start the plants!

We had them with margarine and chives the first night.  Baked with beets, onions and carrots (also from the garden) after that.  Yesterday I made a tasty potato leek soup.  Next up will be potato salad.  Naturally, we’re sharing them with our neighbors, too.

Potatoes have more available protein than soy beans, which explains why the Irish population doubled from four million to eight million in only sixty-five years after potatoes reached their shores from the Andes.

For those of you unfamiliar with the great potato famine, there’s a lesson to be learned.  Mono cropping can be fatal!  Unlike the Incas, who preserved potato biodiversity by cultivating thousands of varieties, the Irish farmers grew primarily only one kind of potato – the “lumper.”  Tragically, a blight struck down the lumper, causing them to rot in the fields and a million people starved.  Another million fled to the new world, likely our ancestors among them.

I’m keeping an eye out our kitchen window for Bob to dig up more tasty tubers as the other potato beds mature.  And while fingerlings don’t store well, I think we can keep up with them.  It’s hard to imagine ever having too many potatoes!

It wasn’t long before our conversation turned to food and gardening and we remembered Farmer Jason telling us that parnips were on his top five list so we decided to come up with our own list.  We asked ourselves, “If we could only grow five vegetables which five would we grow?” Here’s what we decided on:

TOP FIVE MUST-HAVE
Beets
Cabbage
Onions
Potatoes
Tomatoes

Beets do double duty, providing greens as well as the sweet beet root.  Cabbage is magic and extremely versatile.  Much of the world subsists quite nicely on a diet of beans, rice and cabbage. Nearly every meal in our home begins with an onion.  We both have Irish roots, so potatoes are a must.  Plus they are delicious, satisfying and store well.  Tomatoes are indispensable for TLTs (Tempeh, Lettuce and Tomato Sandwiches) in the summer and spaghetti sauce in the winter.

Well that only whet our appetite, so we went on to create four more top fives.

TOP FIVE RAW
Butterhead Lettuce
Salad Turnips
Spinach
Sugar Snap Peas
Sweet Red Pepper

TOP FIVE COOKED
Artichokes
Asparagus
Mushrooms
Shishito Peppers
Sweet Corn

TOP FIVE EASIEST TO GROW
Cucumber
Green Onions
Lettuce
Okra
Tomatoes

TOP FIVE DRIED
Black Beans
Chick Peas
Rice
Soybeans
Wheat

We already have more than twenty five vegetables and herbs growing in our garden and have yet to add artichokes, cabbage, or sweet corn.  And we’d need a bit more acreage to grow enough beans and grain to replace what we currently buy.  Lucky for us our neighbors at Edible Earthscapes are growing black beans and rice!

At the end of the day, it’s fun to make lists and I feel confident that if we were limited, we would live a healthy, happy and sustainable life eating our top twenty-five.

EMP is the acronym for Electro Magnetic Pulse and is something I had not heard much about until I read this story.   In the forward, Newt Gingrich describes how EMP works.  “When an atomic bomb is detonated above the earth’s atmosphere, it can generate a ‘pulse wave,’ which travels at the speed of light, and will short-circuit every electronic device that the ‘wave’ touches on the earth’s surface.”

Gingrich stresses that “we as Americans must face that threat, prepare and know what to do to prevent it.” or the “America we know, cherish, and love will be gone forever.” Forstchen delivers a terrifying scenario over the next 345 pages.

The first few chapters were painful and gave me bad dreams.  I considered abandoning the effort but out of respect for the co-worker who had lent me the book, continued reading. Despite the dire situation, the choices the main character and his cronies continued to make seemed unnecessarily selfish and harsh.  In the hope that there would be an epiphany, a change of heart, perhaps a softening of their paranoia, I slogged my way through to the end.

John, his family, neighbors and community literally don’t know what hit them on the day of the EMP attack.  Their electricity goes out along with their TV, radios and computers.  All non-vintage cars refuse to start.  The nearby highway is instantly littered with inoperable cars and trucks.  “Outsiders” begin walking into town looking for food, a phone, or a place to sleep.

Within a day or two the stores in town have been looted and many of the people in the nursing homes have died.  John coerces the nice lady at the pharmacy to give him a large supply of insulin so he can keep his diabetic daughter alive.  She survives a few months longer than the other diabetics who die when their supplies run out.

The police chief, the mayor and a couple of other town leaders begin meeting daily.  They look to John for counsel because of his military expertise and he uses his mother-in-law’s Edsel to drive down from his home in the mountains every day.  Martial law is declared.  John is elected to conduct the first public execution on the tennis courts.  An ex-drill instructor transforms the college students into an army.

I was unable to identify with the main characters because Forstchen’s military focus and sparse writing skills resulted in shallow characters that are severely stereotyped.  John and the other town leaders were portrayed as patriotic, paranoid, fearful and selfish with a strong belief in violence as a method of coping.  The prototype was male, ex-marine, and capable of defending themselves, their families and the townspeople.

Forstchen’s formulaic writing style is sparse and repetitive.  I lost count of how many times he used “He smiled” “She grinned” and “We’re Americans.”  I disagree with one reviewer who wrote “One Second After is a masterpiece of distopian [sic] literature that ranks with 1984 and Brave New World.”

I found myself identifying with the peripheral characters.  From Mayor Kate Lindsey, who continually votes for softer ways of dealing with the situation, to Jim, the pony tailed Volkswagen mechanic with the ‘can do’ attitude, to the College students who unselfishly gather food from the woods to help feed others.

It was heartening to note that, at the same time this small town is focusing on defending themselves from outsiders, many are digging up their lawns to plant gardens.  There is one discussion about saving some cattle for breeding stock although as far as I can remember, this did not come to pass.

More than not, the focus of the story is guns, cars, and drugs with occasional references to strategies involving water collection, gardens and alternative transportation.  I found it odd that there were no short wave radios in the story and that when conventional radio transmissions were received they were solely from “Voice of America.”

365 days after the EMP event, eighty percent of the population had died, the deer, bear and wild boars have been hunted into near-extinction and food is now being grown everywhere.  On this day, a military column passes through town on their way to Asheville.  They stop to congratulate John and his battalion of former students and to pass out food and vitamins.  The convoy leader shares some news and the column moves on, leaving the lean survivors to continue fending for themselves.  The country is being taken over by the Mexicans and the Chinese and America will never be the same as it once was.

This unlikely read has turned into a valuable experience for me.  It has sparked conversations with friends and farmers about food security and forced me to consider what might happen in an emergency.  Reading “One Second After” reaffirms my decision to focus my energies on cultivating a healthy local foodshed, gives me renewed respect for my neighbors who tirelessly grow food, and inspires me to get to know more of my neighbors.

The next time a friend offers me a book which I might not choose on my own, I’m going to read it.  I’ve learned that reading an alternative point of view can help me understand a different set of values while reinforcing my own beliefs.  I will continue to choose cooperation over force but am now aware that not everyone will follow a non-violent path.